On chloroform and other anæsthetics: their action and administrationSnow, John
History
On chloroform and other anæsthetics: their action and administration
Snow, John
Anesthetics; Chloroform; Snow, John, 1813-1858
We return for a few moments to some further points connected with his
researches on inhalation. In addition to his experiments with volatile
narcotics, he carried out for a long time a series of inquiries with
other medicinal substances, and administered many remedies by inhalation
at the Brompton Hospital, during a period of twenty months. In 1851, he
recorded the result of this experience at the Medical Society of London,
and explained the modes of administering various agents. Some, as
morphia and stramonium, were inhaled with the aid of heat; others, as
hydrocyanic acid and conia, were inhaled at the ordinary temperature.
The particulars of these experiments will be found in a short paper in
the _London Journal of Medicine_ for January 1851.
He continued steadily to investigate the effects of various volatile
agents for the production of insensibility, and arrived by frequent
experiment to such a degree of positive knowledge regarding agents of
this class, that the composition and boiling point of any new chemical
body having been supplied, he could predict whether or not its vapour
would produce narcotism by inhalation. Other than the volatile narcotics
referred to in his present essay, he performed a variety of experiments
with carbonic acid, carbonic oxide, cyanogen, hydrocyanic acid, Dutch
liquid, ammonia, nitrogen, amylovinic ether, puff-ball smoke, allyle,
cyanide of ethyle, chloride of amyle, a carbo-hydrogen from Rangoon tar,
a carbo-hydrogen coming over with amylene, and various combinations of
these. His grand search was for a narcotic vapour which, having the
physical properties and practicability of chloroform, should, in its
physiological effects, resemble ether in not producing, by any accident
of administration, paralysis of the heart. The fact that in almost every
fatal case from chloroform the result had occurred from the action of
the narcotic on the central organ of the circulation, was never absent
from his thoughts. An agent having this effect, however intrinsically
valuable, was not to be put in the hands of every person for
administration. “There would be a great uproar,” he remarked on one
occasion, “if a student were to undertake on the operating table to tie
the femoral artery, and were to open the femoral vein. Yet at some of
our hospitals, the administration of chloroform has been entrusted to
the porter, who would only grin in ignorance, if informed that each time
his services were required, he performed the grand act of suspending for
a time the oxidation of the whole body, and of inducing a temporary
death; and who would tell you, if you asked him the composition of
chloroform, that it was smelling stuff.” He spoke this from no selfish
feeling, but with that kind of regret which an educated engineer would
feel, on referring to the fact of a railway porter who, knowing nothing
of steam, how to put it on, when to take it off, or why it propelled,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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